“You Cannot Possibly Be This Stupid”

by zunguzungu

The shit-storm that academic life can be isn’t very funny. The fact that relocation to places you never wanted to live, terrible job security, terrible odds on even getting a job, terrible benefits for most, long distant relationships, uninspired students, etc, etc, are as normal as they are is not funny.

What makes this video funny, you see, is that the prospective grad student is so stupid. Ha! Which accomplishes several things. Most humanities academics have serious reservations about their career choice, and a sense of frustration that the things we would want our life to be — the things we’ve worked incredibly hard to make it — are not being borne out in reality. Many people get very bitter about this, quite naturally so. And imagining a caricature of ourselves, that dumb, naive, and stupidly idealistic idiot in the video, allows us to cathect our disappointment with the person we’ve become onto our worst nightmare image of ourself.

But that’s the smaller part of what this is about, I think. Mostly, we’re identifying with the person in a position of power bullying the student, and we attempt to pass off contempt and hatred as cynicism. That’s the thing that’s so striking about the humanities xtranormal video (compared, say, to the law school one): how clueless the prospective grad student is. The law school student at least stands up for herself, but the humanities cliche is just a clueless robot, babbling on in utter hermetically sealed envelope of idealism. And since so many of the things that abusive bully of a professor says are so completely true, her bullying gets passed off as realism. This accomplishes several things. For one, it allows us to contrast our own bitter cynicism (we’re identifying with the jaded prof, remember?) with the naiveté of the student. We would never be so naive, therefore we are not her. Which is the same dichotomy between good cynical realism on the one hand (though not coded as male here, as it usually is) and stupid (as usual, infantilized and feminized) idealism, just as when Fish quoted Hemingway. And if we get off on seeing the cynical-realist-us attacking and flagellating the dumb-idealistic-naive-us, well, that says a lot about us.

It also, by the way, allows us to defend our own position (or the one we would like to pretend we will have) from the competition. After all, the glaring thing in both cartoons is the fact that the cynical prof figure is trying to deter the student from following his/her own example. Not that one shouldn’t be very careful about encouraging others to follow in your own example — sometimes tenured profs can encourage students to follow in their footsteps without telling them the whole story about their chances — but as someone I’ve been conversing about this on twitter pointed out, this seems much more like an attempt to demonize the faceless masses of competitors who make the likelihood of our getting a job so much smaller. In other words, we address to the “oversupply” of humanities PhD’s by trying to deter potential competition or project onto it the rage we feel about not getting the job and life we rightfully deserve.

Below, an email I wrote to someone asking for advice on whether to apply to an English PhD program:

I’m not going to tell you to re-consider other options, but you will find that the further along someone is in a PhD program, the more pessimistic they are likely to be about it. Basically, my spiel is that a PhD program can be a wonderful experience, but it will also warp your brain in ways that you will spend much time trying to control, it can leave you stranded at the end, and will definitely require all sorts of painful personal and familial sacrifices over the long run (I’ve developed serious sleeping disorders from the experience, and every grad student fucks up their back eventually; no one tells you this, but it’s a nice illustration of the kind of toll it takes on you). And as you certainly know, to call the job market “bad” is laughably inadequate; the very, very best are competing against the very, very best for the handful of jobs that exist, and even before you get to that point, it can be a life characterized by anxiety and uncertainty. It really needs to be something you feel yourself called to do, and something you feel like you can do well.

If it is, those sacrifices can be worth it. They were for me, I think, even though I’m entering the period where the trade-offs are most stark and the benefits seem slim compensation at best. And I’ve even had an unusually good experience in many ways; Berkeley English is a very good place to do a PhD because the faculty culture is basically humane (characterized by a sort of benevolent negligence, but mostly in a good way). Yet there are also programs that grind you into sausage, and when there’s so little payoff at the end, you need to go somewhere where the life you’ll have there is actually the thing you want (not a stepping stone). Grad school is the thing itself; you might get a job at the end of it, but if you want to do it because you want to be a professor, you’re setting yourself up. You have to want to be a grad student, and to be aware of what that entails.

I don’t want to whittle away your idealism, because that stuff is your oxygen. But you should also have a sense for what you’re up against: the point of graduate school is to remake you in the image of scholars past, and they have a lot of ways of doing it. But the more you realize that, the better off you’ll be in managing the transition. And it certainly isn’t all bad; you can learn an awful lot by emulating prior generations, while a place like Berkeley really is quite benevolent in its negligence: they give you a lot more space to explore and try new things than most programs do. But at the end of the day, they’re job is to re-make and socialize you to the institution, and your job is to find ways to be what you want to be within the institution. And there is friction as that happens. While a PhD program allows you to do certain kinds of exploration — you get the time and space and resources to (potentially) do the kind of explorative work that life normally does not give you much time or space for — it also brings with it a lot of demands, and the trick is figuring out how to manage them, how to differentiate what they want you to learn (and the kinds of pathways you’ll be steered towards, without your realizing it) from the kinds of discoveries you want to make. Blogging, for me, is a way of incorporating non-academic elements of my intellectual life into my work; when you have no outlet for the different things you might be capable of doing and thinking, you often find it very hard to do anything but the things you do have outlets for. I’ve had to work very hard to keep my focus on African literature at Berkeley, not because anyone wants me to change focus — most people are excited about that work — but because, in the absence of other people doing that kind of work, the social rewards can be slim (compared to doing work in fields where you have more interlocutors).

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31 Comments to ““You Cannot Possibly Be This Stupid””

I agree that this isn’t funny but I don’t necessarily think it’s the prof the audience is supposed to identify with… Plenty of people that I’ve seen linking to this have vocally identified with the pigtailed grad student. There’s a before/after dynamic going on; grad students are caught in the dialectic between. American culture still values an infantilized naive idealism as much as a hard cynical realism, if the movies are anything to go by.

That’s amazing to me; for whatever (psychologically revealing) reason, I find it absolutely impossible to see the potential grad student as sympathetic, and yet people do seem to be reading it that way. I guess I put a lot of stress on the fact that the prof is incredibly well informed while the student is incredibly uninformed, socially inept, and apparently just as straight up bad student. The law school prospective student seems much more identifiable to me; she has some naive idealism but also argues back.

I’m one who laughed; I’m also one of those who identified more with the idealistic student than the cynical professor. That’s even though the professor was mostly right. I think it’s because I knew all the cynical stuff (or much of it) coming in, but my idealism is too important to me and my self-image to give up. Cognitive dissonance anyone?

I completely disagree with your characterization fo the aspiring grad student as “a dumb, naive, and stupidly idealistic idiot.” I was exactly like that when I was planning to apply for grad school in Spanish lit. It is precisely this kind of stubborn determination that got me into my grad school program and later into a great tenure-track position. I did meet nasty people like the bitchy prof portrayed here. The reason why they tried so hard to discourage me was their fear of competition and nothing else. None of these stupid scary stories about life after the PhD turn out to be even marginally true. I don’t work even close to 65 hours a week, nobody requires me to participate in 6 committees, the healthcare benifits are fantastic, there are tons of free time, and my personal life is amazing. And the money is not bad at all, considering how little time I spend at work.

My point would be that while this young-idealist’s real world version — both you and me — is utterly sympathetic, the video itself paints her in extremely negative terms. There is nothing stupid about choosing the life we’ve chosen; one needs to be aware of the risks, of course, and everything may not pan out as one hopes. But rather than simply getting angry at the system that has so little use for idealistic and stubborn young people, the video — it seems to me — piles an awful lot of scorn on her (the affection for Harold Bloom, the fact that she gets bad grades but thinks she’s called to the vocation, etc).

Isn’t there something melancholic about the video, precisely because the student occupies a historical space that some (many?) of us once occupied? The student’s belief that she “has been chosen” by grad school is what comes across so clearly. She has not “chosen” it. Rather, she is following a “calling.” I have been that student. And, perhaps, there was a time when it was possible to be that and to enjoy being that.

Part of me mourns the loss of possibility. It is a terrible thing to crush someone’s dreams.

If there is laughter–and the laughter strikes me as less an act of identifying with either character and, rather, identifying with the situation–it is bitter. It can be especially bitter when, as is increasingly the case, this advice is being given by contingent faculty.

I think that’s really well put, and exactly right. I guess I like this as an object to be laughed at, bitterly, painfully, uncomfortably, and anxiously; my account of how “people” respond to it is decidedly in the first person. I’m not sure I would use the word “melancholy,” only because I didn’t feel that way, but other than that word, the experience of a loss of possibility, the loss of being called, yes. I guess what bugs me is the sense that this video is true in a *triumphal* way, as I’ve seen not a few people forwarding it around. I don’t think it’s that; it’s a dream image — formed out of painful contradictions — not a statement to be endorsed.

I think I will now recommend the video to my students who ask my advice about whether they should go to grad school. I’ll tell them that if they recognize themselves in the young woman in the video, then that’s a sign they should definitely consider it. :-)

Like J. (is that you, J.?) I’m not going to watch the stupid video either. But I did watch the law school version, where the gender politics are a little more obvious, and I’m struck by the idea that wanting to stay in school when you are a bad student is a big target of ridicule here. The aspiring lawyer is portrayed as a premed who screwed up in O-chem, and… oh ok ok I guess I’ve got to sit through another irritating xtranormal video if I’m going to comment. Hang on.

All right: I am now stupider and worse. But so — in both cases we see the stupidity of wanting to go to grad/law school being doubled by reported bad grades. It’s gratuitous: none of the English professor’s arguments apply only to students from lower-tier programs; if the student were the best graduate of Nebraska in 30 years and indeed went to Yale, she’d still have a hard time finding a job. If the prelaw girl had aced O-chem, would a career in law be any better for her? Why do we need these idealists to be bad students? My quick answer is that it’s a direct function of the target audience for (and makers of) these videos: a desire to believe that their job is being devalued because the talent pool is being diluted, and that their competition for jobs is State U Coeds With C’s. The market should punish these stupid girls for first going to college at all, then going to grad school, by making sure that they have no employment prospects. If the idealist who wants to go to grad school, or law school, is (say) a Middle Eastern student who speaks five languages and got straight A’s at Penn — well, it’s a little harder to insult him/her on camera for five minutes.

The longer and marginally less bitter answer is that the whole thing is overdetermined by four semi-complementary narratives: the humanities are inferior to STEM/business-related fields; girls are inferior to boys; going to grad school is inferior to Getting A Real Job; the liberal, broke-ass academy is inferior to the conservative World of fantasy Profits. Anyone who can succeed in any of the latter endeavours will stay the hell away from the former: they’re so mutually exclusive that it’s easier to imagine a girl with bad grades wanting to go to grad school than a guy who worked for 3-4 years at D.E. Shaw applying to “go back” to Columbia or Princeton. It’s just too upsetting to imagine that the academy would be as unfair to him, with his excellent analytical skills, as it is to State U Coed with C’s, and thus: no video; not funny.

But what should bad students do, anyway? Presumably they should either curl up and die, or build a time machine and go back to freshman year. I can’t believe how cranky this made me.

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Well, at least watching videos like this is easier than breaking out the heavy cord and whispering “mea maxima culpa” as it arcs swiftly backward. I suspect that Keguro is right that the situation portrayed is more identifiable than the cipher-like girl; learning to punish one’s inner innocent seems like a way of simultaneously repressing and celebrating that necessary kernal of naivete from a safe and reasonable distance. She must be abjected before she can be nostalgically cherished. I doubt that the identification would hold in a monologue; the secret ingredient is pain.

Me, I thought it was funny/not funny in the same way good observational comedy — the original version of ‘The Office’ for example — is. It’s not so much about the mockery of the student or the prof’s attitude, but that many of us have been there. We have had students who are *not* good students who really think they are. We have had students with entitlement issues. And we have tried to help them to do better work, or to tell them that grad school requires far more work and dedication than they have ever shown, and they still blithely tell us that they know better than we do how to be historians, or lit specialists, or [insert field here]. So unlike you, I think the humor comes from the recognition of a situation that seems really pretty unreal to us as something that is far more common than we thought.

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